The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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FEMINISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND CULTURE IN AFRICA

Tanella Boni

Translated from French by Eva Boodman

Introduction: Contextualizing Theories and Practices

African feminisms emerge out of a heterogeneous context. Because Africa’s globalization has been ongoing for centuries now, African women pay a steep price for it, all while the patriarchal order remains firmly in place.

But what is Africa? “Africa” as a designation refers to a dynamic geographical, political, military, economic, social, familial, historical, linguistic, cultural and religious context. The African context—continental, but also diasporically dispersed and transatlantic—is marked by complexity and multiplicity. Borders were drawn onto the African continent on the goodwill of the European leaders rallied around Bismarck at the Berlin Conference of November 1884 to February 1885. For this reason, Africa is not one but many broken-up Africas that have undergone slavery, colonization and racial segregation, as in the case of South African Apartheid. In spite of the way that these Africas are differentiated by their languages, educational systems, and cultures, the Venus Hottentot, whose body was instrumentalized and dehumanized by whites at the beginning of the nineteenth century, continues to be a strong symbol of the way that African women’s rights have been violated because of the color of their skin, the shape of their bodies, and their gender.

Today’s difficult postcolonial situations—and the challenges of living in them—are the result of having been subject to different forms of colonization. The feminisms that emerge in this kind of context ask real questions that cannot be fully treated by academic research or “development” activism. And yet, the challenge of a plural Africa must be faced here, too, and not just by men, around whom revolve constructions of virility and masculine dominance. Women represent half of the African population. Irrespective of their age or multiple identities, these women continue to struggle against the real and imaginary barriers that must be deconstructed in order for them to have the right to a full and complete existence. There are many African feminist movements: some based on industry, some transdisciplinary or transnational. These movements work, in theory and practice, to transform social and political realities. But these feminisms—which sometimes reject the term “feminism” to adopt another, like “womanism,” for example—are plagued by the question of their culturalist or universalist position, the question of how to enter into dialogue with other feminisms. And on top of all of this, there is a linguistic gap that these feminisms must find ways to overcome.

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Feminism as Engagement

For a long time, like the African writers discussed by Susan Arndt (Arndt 2000), I refused to be called a “feminist” even if my novels and poems showcased the violence done to women and the subtleties of the patriarchal order. To reject the word “feminist” does not mean that one is not concerned with feminism. Today, I ask myself whether “feminism” is indeed a doctrine, that is to say, a set of determinate concepts that form a system. I think, rather, that it is a life philosophy in which the subordination of women and the injustices done to them are explained through concepts, including that of “gender.” To effect an “epistemological break” of my own, I asked myself whether I, too, should use the concept of “gender.” But first I needed to test it, and not reject it out of hand, as other African women have done. All around me, gender was the explanation for everything: in Africanist discourses, but also in those of development agencies and even universities. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) talked about “gendered approaches” in their grant applications. As soon as there were a few women on a team made up of many men, a project was thought to have used such an “approach” and to have satisfied the requirements of the granting agency! The instrumentalization of the word “gender” is so striking, in fact, that one no longer feels the need to ask what the word means or what the concept refers to.

The many African feminisms, however, cannot be boiled down to “gender” or a “gendered approach,” since that word does not mean much if it isn’t being applied to a set of facts. Indeed, it seems to me that “gender” serves to unravel the causes of the inequalities, injustices and harms that women must face. Once these causes are perceived, one asks how the situation can be improved. In this way, “gender” is both a tool for thought and a method of social transformation.

I was trying to find the justification for things needing to be done better, with less injustice, more rights, and responsibilities shared equally between men and women. I was asking myself loads of questions in a philosophy department where for twenty years I was the only woman professor. Today, fortunately, there are ten or so women teaching in that department. I don’t know whether they worry about “gender” or whether they choose freely the authors they would like to teach.

As far I’m concerned, my salutary break came, in the first instance, out of the discipline from which women were notably absent. I was teaching the history of philosophy, which had nothing to do with my lived reality. Thinkers from other regions of the world, and Africa in particular, had no place in a curriculum modeled on the teaching priorities of French universities. Women philosophers were practically invisible, with rare exceptions like Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil or Simone de Beauvoir. But in my own work, I found I had to limit myself to a few ancient philosophers. My research ended up focusing on negative representations of the female sex as an equivalent to “matter” in Aristotle’s biology (Aristotle 2002). The male sex was the beautiful sex, active and superior. I understood that Western philosophy supplied all the elements needed to justify sexual hierarchy, the inferiority of women and their exclusion from public debate, with some exceptions. In reproduction, males had a “natural” power over females. In this way, the philosophy that I was teaching, which was far from “African,” gave me the material to think about my own situation and that of other women. This alien philosophy, so far away from my own experience, gave me a theoretical arsenal.

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In the social, political, cultural and academic world where I lived, inequality and injustice were law. I understood that a man and a woman with equal competence did not have equal chances of being listened to or taken seriously in the realm of knowledge production or scholarly debate. Something broke in me; I would never be able to see the world in the same way. From that moment onward, I allowed myself to imagine my environment as a world of walls and obstacles that become visible and audible only when one develops an awareness of them.

It was not in philosophy, however, that I was first able to express the inequality and violence that I was experiencing and observing, but in literature, which I believed to be a space of freedom. (The problems I continue to encounter with publishing are other barriers in the so-called Francophone world. Age, subject matter, language of publication (French), and the laws of the free market have to be taken into account along with an author’s sex to understand what is at work in a publication, which is not free of constraint, in spite of the invention of the web.) But I needed to go further, theoretically, to understand this world structured like a network with different orders of interconnected levels. In the twenty-first century, women have not been the only ones subject to patriarchal programming; so are all humans whose bodies or sexualities do not conform to the moral, political, cultural and religious norms of patriarchal society. So to reject the word “feminist,” as I did, following in the footsteps of many other African women, wasn’t to reject a mere label, nor was it to surrender in the face of the struggle.

For these reasons, up until 2008, I was reluctant to characterize my own theoretical research as “feminist.” “Feminism?” I would say; “I’m more interested in discussing ‘the woman question,’ since, philosophically speaking, it really is a question” (Boni 2008). Even if it is a philosophical question, there is a vast gulf between the word “woman” and the word “feminist.” What separates the two is not the quest for a definition of the category of women; it is, rather, a form of engagement. It is, on the one hand, a cold, dispassionate question that can be dissected externally and can give rise to all kinds of interpretations and discussions, just like any philosophical question. But on the other hand, it is an involved engagement, an approach that comes from our body and soul and maybe even our gut, where there is anger, revolt and determination. All feminisms seem to me to be of this order, and feminisms related to Africa to an even greater degree.

African feminism’s unofficial history could be told in this way, before it made any reference to academic research or treatises on violence against women, their place in “development” or their rights and duties as citizens. On an individual level, then, I would say that one doesn’t get into feminism in the way that one does a religion, that is, by choice. Rather, we become feminists because we have no choice. We struggle and resist so that we can “find” ourselves, take responsibility, have a place in the world, and we do this by supporting and caring for ourselves and our loved ones. In this way, concern for self and others is a step prior to all reasoning and activism we might want to qualify as “feminist.” When novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Adichie 2012; 2014) writes about running up against the language, facts, and gestures that underscore the power of patriarchal domination, she doesn’t learn about it in books: it is an experienced reality. What gives her the right to speak it, however, is the authority that comes from being an internationally renowned author. In this way, creative writing, art, song and cinema are all materials that show us that before all theorization and all activism, we have our own experience. Engagement starts, then, with the clear recognition that what is wrong, and affects us so closely, must change.

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We see, then, that when we engage ourselves, we break with what seems natural in the eyes of most. But does this mean that we must engage ourselves alone? With others? This depends on our own experiences, the kinds of encounters we have, and the kind of dialogue we maintain with other feminists from Africa and elsewhere. It also depends on our understanding, at each stage of our lives, of the fundamental questions that, paradoxically, can separate us from other women, all while bringing us closer in many ways.

The State of Affairs: A Brief Overview

The questions of identity, colonization and postcolonialism—and even imperialism and globalization—are grafted onto African feminism. While there is, among African women, a desire to throw off the colonial yoke by thinking of ourselves through the paradigms of a pre-colonial past, it is also worrisome that theoretical reflection is often too far away from the situations in which most African women find themselves. These situations are characterized by urgent matters such as war and violence, diseases like AIDS, the militarization of African societies, and the non-application of international laws and conventions (most notably CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, UN General Assembly, 1979).

But how are we to name what is happening when the situation of women’s lives is so complex? What are the locations that give rise to, and are points of transmission for, feminist research and activism in Africa?

Since the 1970s, big international conferences, like those organized in Mexico (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and all those that followed, have been occasions for African women to express their concerns. With these conferences came an unprecedented activism that developed along many different institutional lines: through the academy (Imam, Mama, and Sow 1997) and international institutions like the UN and the World Bank, within religious institutions, or through more independent initiatives like NGOs and women’s associations fighting for economic, social and cultural rights. From the point of view of the state, “Ministries of Women’s Affairs” or of “The Status of Women” made notable appearances in several West African countries. An example of such state-organized feminism are the activities of every 8th of March, meant to raise consciousness about women’s issues like excision in the regions where it is practiced. Theory, especially from a “gender and development” perspective, followed closely behind political practice and activism, and took several orientations: gender and politics, gender and economics, gender and reproductive health, HIV-AIDS, sexuality and violence, etc. (Bennett 2010). Little by little, research centers and institutes in Gender and Women’s Studies were born. In Dakar, CODESRIA (the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) created, in the 1990s, a new series of publications dedicated to gender, guided by the following statement:

CODESRIA’s series on gender expresses the need to challenge the forms of masculinity that are the basis for the repression of women. The goal of the series is to undertake and sustain social science research through discerning inquiry and debate that challenges the conventional knowledge, structures and ideologies narrowly informed by the centrality of masculinity.

(CODESRIA, www.codesria.org)

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Today, the African Gender Institute and Gender and the Department of Women’s Studies for Africa’s transformation (GWS) at the University of Cape Town have a journal, Feminist Africa, with an editorial policy that is summarized in this way:

Feminist Africa is a continental gender studies journal produced by the community of feminist scholars. It provides a platform for intellectual and activist research, dialogue and strategy. Feminist Africa attends to the complex and diverse dynamics of creativity and resistance that have emerged in postcolonial Africa, and the manner in which these are shaped by the shifting global geopolitical configurations of power.

(Feminist Africa, http://agi.ac.za/journals)

Since the beginning of the 2000s, the journal has published around twenty thematic issues that are available online. In 2013, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the African Union, the journal published an issue devoted to “Pan-Africanism and Feminism.” The issue commemorated the not insignificant role played by women in war, conflict and liberation struggle: in Uganda, Guinea-Bissau, and Sudan, but also in the continental and transatlantic Pan-African struggle. Another journal, JENDA: A Journal of Cultural and African Women’s Studies, created in the early 2000s, articulated its goals in this way:

Our conceptualization of JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies was guided by two main objectives: the first is to create a space from which to theorize our experiences, presently marginalized in today’s global context of unequal economic relations; and the second is to wrest ourselves from the mould of stereotypical assumptions in which this international economic order and its attendant culture of hierarchy have cast us.

(www.jendajournal.com/nzegwu1.html)

This journal, which has received much recognition, is published through Binghamton University.

While in most Francophone countries feminist research seems not to be a priority, given that it is absent from many research and teaching programs, in the Anglophone world things are happening. Anglophone feminist thinking has been moving forward for several decades now, and has a long tradition of debate on women and gender, masculinity and femininity, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) rights.

With this in mind, in November of 2006 a forum of African feminists was organized in Accra by the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF). The forum brought together 100 participants, mostly Anglophone, to adopt a “Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists.” The Charter states: “Africa has a long tradition of resistance to patriarchy. We claim henceforth the right to formalize our actions, to write for ourselves, to formulate our own strategy, and to do this ourselves as African feminists” (AWDF 2006: 11). The question of women’s rights is doubly evoked in the charter: It is a matter of being citizens in the fullest sense, to be free to make this kind of demand, to have freedom of speech and thought; but it is also a matter of being free to meet the challenge of taking care of one’s own problems without leaving that task to be undertaken by others, and especially actors from “the West.” To work together, all that is needed is agreement on principles, methods and actions to carry out. The question of language, however, is yet another difficulty that blocks the flow of ideas.

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The Language Gap

A language barrier separates African feminists from one another. We cannot say it enough: the languages in which we express ourselves do not enable debate, even when English speakers, French speakers, Portuguese speakers and Arabic speakers are brought together at big conferences. What can be talked about? Must each of them wait until their own words are translated from one language to another? In this way, the language gap is a parameter to take into account in understanding the exclusion of African women and their lack of visibility on the playing field of serious debate. They are even less audible when they do not express themselves or write in English, the dominant language. One might think that official languages bring feminists closer to one another in serving as unifying vehicles across a multiplicity of local languages. One only needs to consult a bibliography of feminist research or gender studies in Africa to be convinced of this: English, the dominant language, is the language of publication for most single-author essays, co-authored reports, and feminist movement publications. English is also the language in which a number of concepts were invented, including womanism, stiwanism, nego-feminism and many others. Where “womanism” is a term used by Alice Walker (Walker 1984 [1983]), Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi’s thought is to be differentiated from the Walkerian conception of womanism, and indeed, from Western feminism on the whole (Ogunyemi 1985). According to Ogunyemi, “womanists” account for culture, race, politics and economics in such a way that gender no longer occupies a central role in Walker’s theory. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s stiwanism takes STIWA (social transformation including women in Africa) to be the starting place for understanding the role of women in society. In the case of Obioma Nnaemeka’s nego-feminism, feminism is taken to be a “negotiation without ego,” where theory informs practice and vice versa (Nnaemeka 2004). These different concepts articulated by Nigerian activists and theorists, however, have yet to unite all the African feminisms.

As long as francophonie—the Francophone world as a political and cultural realm—allows some African countries to become linked to Western countries like France and Canada, then there will be some spaces (like colloquia, for example) where debates can take place and experiences can be exchanged. But one has to ask what place African feminist philosophy has in these Francophone debates, since it seems to be practically non-existent. For that matter, at meetings that aim to bring together French, Quebecois, Belgian, Swiss, and African Francophones (Sow 2009), the questions most important to Anglophone feminists received little attention or were entirely absent. Do Francophone African feminists, who find themselves preempted or supported by other feminists, really need to ask themselves the question of Western dominance?

Gender Alone Cannot Explain All Injustice

The majority of theorists and activists, regardless of what languages they speak, do not disregard gender’s connections with class, age, social and family position, not to mention a number of other elements that have to be taken into consideration when biological sex is discussed. There is, in fact, no undefined “woman” without reference to a situation. I’m tempted to say that one is born a girl—that one is certainly someone’s girl, even when one is “fatherless”—but one becomes woman, which is a long-term undertaking. One becomes a mother, which society expects us to do in addition to many other things. Motherhood is, without a doubt, a concept to clarify, and a point of difference between African women and other feminists who claim Simone de Beauvoir for her account of motherhood as alienation of the female body (Beauvoir 1949). What many African cultures have in common is a conception of sterility as a great tragedy for a woman who cannot bear children, as well as a dishonor for the husband (Kourouma 1970). This is a reference to the idea that the female body is made to bear children and to preserve the honor of her husband. However, a mother is not only the one who gives life; her role is also to provide food, care and education. There are nourishing mothers, spiritual mothers and protective mothers, and in this way, they are powerful and have both men and women under their control. Mothers-in-law can rule entire families. Relationships of brotherhood and sisterhood, moreover, are not always horizontal, but are hierarchized. Sisterhood is, for African women, a point of integration and stability in the family. The concept of family, then, needs to be revisited and adapted to local realities; it does not correspond to ideas of family that come from elsewhere. The notion of “couple” also needs to be rethought. To what does “couple” refer? The question is worth asking when, in certain situations, polygamy is at play in its most insidious forms, and even among educated men and women aware of their rights. One asks, then, how to account for these complex situations that seem to be socially acceptable while also being in contradiction with written laws. What recourse is available to women whose rights are violated if written laws do not protect them, and oral and traditional laws do not recognize the injustices they are made to endure? (Boni 2011)

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In this way, the individual lives of African women are marked by a long and paradoxical history of violence. The violence begins in the family. I’m talking here about life, because it’s where everything begins: there can be no emancipation, no freedom, no justice if we do not first have the right to life. And this right is threatened when one is born a girl. Does the role of a boy not have more value than that of a girl? Many African women who want a son, and not just those in rural areas, undergo multiple pregnancies, often under difficult conditions, until the desired child with the male sex is born. The desire for a male child is, in my view, an internalization of patriarchal principles by women themselves, who unwittingly participate in its reproduction. If a family happens to accept the birth of a girl anyway, is it not because, from the moment of her birth, she has already entered into the framework of a symbolic exchange? The girl will marry, and this will be of great economic benefit to her parents.

And so, everything does seem to be built around biological sex, motherhood, but also symbolic relationships—which can also be monetary (and it should be noted that not all forms of sexual expression are tolerated). We continue to think that female genital mutilation is part of the “feminization” of the body. And what if this, too, were only another expression of the dominance of patriarchal power in the regions where it is practiced? However, it was this view of the practice that offended many African feminists at the Copenhagen Conference in 1980, an occasion when suspicion took hold between Africans, Europeans, and Americans (Sow 1998). Nonetheless, the urgency was clear: tools were needed to understand and discuss our own reality.

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Women’s Silence and the Reproduction of Patriarchal Ideology

If theoretical discourse and radical activist strategy use “gender” in connection with other concepts to analyze the place of women “in development,” concrete lives must also benefit from the illumination of the concept. And this is the rub. In private life, the patriarchal order, the principles of which are anchored into ways of thinking, continues to reign unabated. In this way, life trajectories—which I call biographies—are of great importance, and not just the activities one performs. Who African women are is just as important as what they do. In fact, human activities are never disembodied; it is precisely bodies and souls who undertake them, human beings who imagine, think, work and speak. Speech, then, or rather its absence, is a key element on which the violence driven by the prejudice of patriarchal ideology is exercised. From this point of view, we see that one of the survival strategies adopted by African women is to act as though everything is fine, to never speak from the place that hurts the most. Only writing and other art forms can attempt to break this wall of silence (D’Almeida 1994). In “Francophone” literature, novelist Mariama Bâ (2001 [1979]) was one of the first to discuss internal states and intimacy in relation to gender, sexual relationships, social organization, religion, and polygamy. Silence overtakes the sense of revolt that boils up in us; and this is why most African women refuse to call themselves “feminist,” as if all feminisms were a danger to be avoided.

On reflection, the refusal to call oneself “feminist” reveals the existence of a dominant multi-secular system that thinks of itself as holding the standard of truth. Other forms of discrimination and violence graft themselves onto this system, imposing their diktats in men’s or women’s voices: through family education, public space, the workplace, schools and universities, indeed, every public or private space. Women are efficient conduits in their reproducing and transmitting the values of the patriarchal order. A time comes, however, when women open their eyes and see what is around them. They finally accept that they can conceive of their own world, their own history, their own relationships with other worlds, their place and their future on the chessboard of globalization, by and for themselves. Indeed, thinking for oneself, when one is an African woman, is in the first place to break with a number of prejudices; it is to want things to change. It isn’t to think against “man,” or to reject concepts made elsewhere, but to think with one’s own faculties and to imagine the world with one’s own sensibilities, by trying to find one’s own place among other humans and living things, animals and plants. This is what the Kenyan political activist and ecologist Wangari Maathai—who disappeared in 2011—did (Maathai 2006).

Conclusion

The act of being an African feminist is a challenge one gives to oneself. In fact, cultures, traditions, and all sorts of particulars show us that “gender” doesn’t designate a relationship of domination comprised of only two poles: the woman in the inferior position, and the man in the superior position. Relationships of domination reproduce themselves and are interconnected; to know this, one only needs to ask what a family is. What is a mother? What is a father? Does “the couple” exist? What is sexuality? Why are fathers so often physically absent when all family, social, spiritual, and intellectual life is organized in their name? Fundamental philosophical questions show us the degree to which the word “gender” merits being questioned. It could be that women themselves are at the center of the development of informal economic life, though this remains to be proven. Should gender be understood from the standpoint of exclusive ethnicities in a plural Africa that includes thousands of “ethnic groups,” languages, religions, and cultures? Though there may be many types of domination, patriarchal ideology defends the interests of men, irrespective of their situation. Whether it is a matter of relationships between individuals in a family or in a state context—and at state summits there are mothers and fathers in attendance, just like in the family—everything revolves around the organization of masculinities that must remain infallible, virile and powerful. We understand, too, why LGBTI-identified people have so few rights in many African countries and are hounded by public and political opinion, and moral, social and religious law. Is being a feminist not, then, in the end, to disrupt the order built by patriarchal ideology that reproduces itself at every level of sociality in the name of normality?

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In African philosophical discourse, the word “feminism” is quite rare. Other disciplines like sociology, anthropology, ethnology, history, geography, economics, and literary studies tend to recognize feminist concerns well before any African woman philosopher—a phrase that always makes one smile—could give herself permission to think through the realities of most immediate concern to her. For a long time now, Western thinkers have analyzed the lives of African men and women, their cultures, societies, and religions. My impression of the current situation is that the thought produced by African women does not exist in philosophy, and especially not in francophone African countries. Women professors and researchers in philosophy do exist, however, in universities. They must struggle to include topics related to gender, intersectionality, and women’s lives, knowledge and thought into research and teaching programs—efforts that do not always succeed. It is an arduous task, because one must have a voice in the first place, that is, some kind of power to change the way philosophy sees itself. African philosophy textbooks are rarely used in francophone countries, since Western philosophy is taken to be primary, and texts by African authors are virtually absent. This is the legacy of colonialism but also of the postcolonial situation in which the patriarchal system remains in place. Research on African philosophers yields only limited results in specialized publications or on the Internet.

The debate on African philosophy in the 1970s—the result of which was a diversification of African philosophies—did not include a single feminist dimension among its concerns. The philosophers who took part in this debate are men, and those who continue to be cited today are also men. From this point of view, invisibility is a problem that every African woman philosopher must have on her mind, before ever calling herself a feminist, since there is a great risk that her words will remain unheard.

Because public opinion cannot, on its own, imagine philosophers as women (even if women philosophy professors do exist in universities), the only remaining path is to publish philosophical essays that take women, men, gender, and sexualities into account, all while thinking through political, economic, social, and cultural particularities. Feminist philosophers have a duty to make their thinking known. It’s first of all a matter of thinking alongside the first feminist thinkers in the social and human sciences, without forgetting that philosophy is one’s specialization. To be able to change imaginaries programmed by patriarchal ideology that cannot see women in philosophy (or philosophy in women), is in the first place to write and publish. In francophone countries, this resembles the process of “squaring a circle”: one must be able to find editors interested in the writing of women philosophers, but one must also find a way for these books to be read by students as well as the general public—the latter being an entire battle on its own. But to write in French, a language within easy reach, is already to take the first step.

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